Lawrence from San Antonio, Texas, wonders if spelling is a factor in the different meanings of awful, which describes something negative, and awesome, which describes something positive. Spelling doesn’t come into play here; in fact, for years the word awful was actually spelled with an e after the w. The difference in these words is the result of what linguists call semantic drift. Something similar happened with the words terror, terrific, and terrible. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Awesome, Awful, and Semantic Drift”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Lawrence from San Antonio, Texas.
Hi, Lawrence.
Just an observation.
I’ve noticed that the word to be in awe seems like a pretty cool thing.
I was just awe or inspired or something was awesome.
But when you add full to the end of it, you got awe full,
which kind of puts a negative connotation on it.
And I don’t know if it’s because the awful is spelled without the E, whereas awesome has the E.
And I don’t understand what the difference is.
It’s a little complicated.
The spelling doesn’t really come into play.
It has no relationship to the meaning of it.
Awful actually used to be spelled pretty frequently with an E until it became regularized with the rest of English spelling.
But what we have here is something called semantic drift.
And semantic drift is when the meanings of words change over time.
And so when you take a word like awe and you add a suffix like some or add a suffix like full, each one of those new words, awesome and awful, become their own entities.
And they undergo their own semantic drift and they can go very far from the original.
Pretty much awe, A-W-E, means what it’s always meant, which is reverence for something amazing or great, maybe, is one way to define it.
But those other two words have gone through a lot of shifts.
Awful, for example, pretty relatively quickly started to be used for emphasis.
We might even today say that’s an awfully great thing of you to do for me, which isn’t really negative.
But at the same time, we might say that is an awful painting, right?
Right.
And so there’s two different kinds of semantic shift on that word alone, awful, awfully.
And then awesome did a similar thing where it kind of kept the positive value.
And it actually filled in this gap where once awful went from being meaningful of awe to being more negative generally, awesome shows up.
So kind of reinstate this meaning of having awe or having reverence or adoration for a thing.
So it’s really interesting.
This is like you can have five kids raised by the same parents, and they’ll each become their own individuals,
live their own lives and do their own things and be unique and still have a little bit of the original about them.
Oh, I see.
Oh, that’s interesting.
Right? Yeah.
That’s interesting. Yeah.
Semantic drift.
And I’ve heard that term before, but…
Yeah. I’ll leave you with something to think about. Think about terrific and terror.
Or terrible.
And terrible, yeah.
And terrible, yeah. So semantic drift is a real thing. It’s how language changes.
And these words, frankly, they go back in some form or another to about the year 1000.
Really?
Yeah. So they’ve got some history behind them, and that is long enough for them to do somersaults and cartwheels on their way to becoming something new.
That’s interesting. That’s interesting. Thank you.
Thank you so much for calling.
I appreciate your show, and I love you guys and listen to you every chance I get.
Thank you very much.
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We really appreciate it.
Take care now.
All right.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
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